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The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas

(A new novel, published by Outpost19, 2017)

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“A beautiful meditation on the interplay of art, time, and memory . . . a luminous portrait of a woman without vision who is just beginning to see.”

—Ann Packer, The Children’s Crusade
“Chessman [tells this story] with simple grace, delivering in Estelle Degas’ engaging voice . . . the challenges of marriage, family, and love.”

—Meg Waite Clayton, The Race for Paris
“This nuanced story of love lost and found, wrapped around the experience of seeing and being seen, is itself a masterful work of art.”

—Elizabeth Rosner, Electric City
“Chessman brings us . . . one monumental day in which the discovery of a sketchbook leads to the reevaluation of a whole life. This novel is a profound delight from beginning to end.”

—Micah Perks, author of What Becomes Us
“Chessman inhabits this sumptuous world of New Orleans with grace and a kind of heightened sensual alertness, a mystery that unravels level by level…This is a lovely novel that I would recommend to anyone.”

—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
“There is heartbreak here and very few escape, but there also is enormous love”

—Suzanne Levine, author of Grand Canyon Older Than Thought
“An utterly beguiling story . . . With the clarity and simplicity of a piano sonata, [this] is a novel about perception, enduring love, and the complex family legacy of a great artist.”

—Katharine Weber, The Music Lesson

Harriet Scott Chessman, fiction writer and librettist, is happy to announce that MY LAI, the operatic piece for which she wrote the libretto, is in Kronos Quartet‘s upcoming 2017-18 season. Commissioned by Kronos Performing Arts Association, and composed by Jonathan Berger, this one-singer opera about Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who intervened in the My Lai massacre in 1968, will come to Singapore, New York (BAM), University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. In addition, Chessman’s fifth novel, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas, came out in 2017 with Outpost19. Chessman is the author of the acclaimed earlier novels The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. Her fiction has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian. She has taught literature and creative writing at Yale University, Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program. After twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in Connecticut.

(photo credit: Catherine Kiernan)

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